Extant birds have an extensive spectral range of colour vision among vertebrates, but evidence of colour vision among extinct birds has hitherto been lacking. An exceptionally well-preserved extinct enantiornithine fossil bird from the Early Cretaceous Jiufotang Formation (120 Ma) of Liaoning, China, provides the first report of mineralised soft tissue of a bird eye. Cone cells are identified, ...

The Crato Formation paleoflora is one of the few equatorial floras of the Early Cretaceous. It is diverse, with many angiosperms, especially representatives of the clades magnoliids, monocotyledons and eudicots, which confirms the assumption that angiosperm diversity during the last part of the Early Cretaceous was reasonably high. The morphology of a new fossil monocot is studied and compared ...

A single brachiosaurid sauropod cervical vertebra from the Wessex Formation (Barremian, Early Cretaceous) of the Isle of Wight is remarkable for its size. With a partial centrum length (i.e., excluding evidence of the anterior condyle) of 745 mm it represents the largest sauropod cervical reported from Europe and is close in size to cervical vertebrae of the giant brachiosaurid Brachiosaurus br...

BACKGROUND Eolambia caroljonesa is known from copious remains from the lower Cenomanian Mussentuchit Member of the Cedar Mountain Formation in eastern Utah; however, the taxon has been only briefly described. Thus, we present herein a complete osteological description of Eolambia. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The description of Eolambia presented here is based upon the holotype partial skel...

The Aneuretopsychidae is an unspeciose and enigmatic family of long-proboscid insects that presently consist of one known genus and three species from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous of north-central Asia. In this paper, a new genus and species of fossil aneuretopsychid is described and illustrated, Jeholopsyche liaoningensisgen. et sp. n. Fossils representing this new taxon were collecte...

The Early Cretaceous Greater Ontong Java Event in the Pacific Ocean may have covered ca. 1% of the Earth's surface with volcanism. It has puzzled scientists trying to explain its origin by several mechanisms possible on Earth, leading others to propose an extraterrestrial trigger to explain this event. A large oceanic extraterrestrial impact causing such voluminous volcanism may have traces of ...

The divergence times of lizardfishes (Euteleostei: Aulopiformes) are estimated utilizing a Bayesian approach in combination with knowledge of the fossil record of teleosts and a taxonomic review of fossil aulopiform taxa. These results are integrated with a study of character evolution regarding deep-sea evolutionary adaptations in the clade, including simultaneous hermaphroditism and tubular e...

in this research, calcareous nannofossils of the upper cretaceous deposits of the souteast lar have been investigated. the upper cretaceous deposits have a thickness of 173 meters and consist of thick layers of marl and marly limestone. for introducing calcareous nannofossil assemblages and biozones, 141 slides of the gurpi formation in southeast of lar area have been studies which led to ident...

Background. The Cretaceous of southern Europe was characterized by an archipelago setting with faunas of mixed composition of endemic, Laurasian and Gondwanan elements. However, little is known about the relative timing of these faunal influences. The Lower Cretaceous of East-Central Europe holds a great promise for understanding the biogeographic history of Cretaceous European biotas because o...